Seven years ago, Grady enjoyed critical success with a book called "The Arsonist's Daughter," but he's been unable to follow up. Grady is suffering not from writer's block, but a bad case of the Can't Quits: He's already written more than 2,000 pages, and he's not done yet.

At the Pittsburgh-area college where Grady teaches writing, he has a colleague called Q (Rip Torn), who churns out a new best-seller every 18 months. He has a married lover named Sara (Frances McDormand), who not only happens to be the chancellor but is pregnant with their child. And he has a student, James Leer (Tobey Maguire), who writes such dark, unsettling prose that Grady doesn't know whether to encourage him to dig deeper or to get help while he still can.

Grady's response to all this and a lot of stuff I've edited out? He stays stoned all day long.

"Wonder Boys" is not the first movie about being stuck, but it doesn't have a lot of precedents. There's "The Accidental Tourist," "Barton Fink," and "The Fabulous Baker Boys," whose script, probably not so coincidentally, was written by Steve Kloves. Kloves adapted "Wonder Boys" from a novel by Michael Chabon, and there are hundreds of novels about being stuck; it's almost a subgenre unto itself.

But there is an implication contained in the word "movie" that the thing should move, and it might be easy to be frustrated with Grady, even as we are amused at the ongoing predicament that constitutes his life. The complications include everything from a murdered dog to an enamored yet perceptive student (Katie Holmes) to James' theft of a jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe at her wedding to Joe DiMaggio. Yet Grady looks at these and the film's parade of everyday eccentrics with the bemusement that accompanies being a writer, or stoned, or both.

Director Curtis Hanson doesn't even make too much of the plural implication of the title, which ties Grady's fate to James'; faced with a new Wonder Boy, the old one feels more mortal, more vulnerable. Instead, Hanson just follows Grady around as he sorts things out, moving from point A to C, or maybe D.

For much of the way, he's accompanied by James, who has been writing a life instead of living one. Much of the story's charm comes from the way Grady dispenses literary advice without realizing it, working out his own issues while doing his best to avoid them. In time, we begin to realize "Wonder Boys" is not about dashed dreams but the ones that come true without warning.

"Wonder Boys" is not the movie one might have expected from Hanson, who had looked for all the world like a journeyman before "L.A. Confidential" awakened either us or him to his talents. "Wonder Boys" is as casual and understated as "Confidential" was bold and stylized. But Hanson has always been great with actors -- remember Julianne Moore in "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," or Kevin Bacon in "The River Wild"? What really carries us through "Wonder Boys" is the characterizations.